Preparing for the Christmas tree festival

Oh dear, the Christmas trees are already three sheets to the wind!
It seems that the years of watching Blue Peter were wasted, after all. Mind you, the presenters were not working with two-year-olds...

These mini-trees are going to be hung on our tree in St Laurence's church at the Festival of Christmas trees. I'm quite sure I will blip this event, I do every year. The inventiveness grows from year to year.

I felt very tired at work, and much in need of a Lemsip. It's the time of year when children and adults alike start dropping like flies. 

I made it to my class, though, and finished reading The spy who came in from the cold  in class! Excellent book, I enjoyed it so much more this time around than when I first read it in 1999. Next week will be the final instalment of my social history and literature of the early 1960s course.

Back at home, I cooked sausages and started reading Terms and Conditions, which is about the life of girls' boarding schools in the UK, 1939-79. I read the chapter about convents, but found it irritatingly generalised. The old girls interviewed were not at MY convent!  We certainly never had to pray for a Conservative general election victory, even if Perthshire was a Tory stronghold in the 1970s; 

No, our most fervent prayers were reserved for the health of the Pope. Whenever a white-faced nun gasped out that she had 'some dreadful, dreadful news' it usually concerned the health of the pontiff. Pope John Paul I died in his sleep while I was in Duchesne dormitory, and JPII was shot while I slept in Mater wing. Their predecessor, Pope Paul VI, had had the misfortune to die during our school summer holidays.

In recent years, I found in the hall of the school where I now work, a note penned from one member of staff to another, passed on during assembly. It contained some information about a forthcoming activity and added, 

"Great news about the pope!"